This is the newsletter that was put out earlier this morning. If you didn't receive the newsletter, here's the contents of it:


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Dear DKPSystem.com member,

The much anticipated forum rewrite for DKPSystem.com is now ready for deployment, which will begin around 11pm CDT tonight (Tuesday, Sept 9th) and is expected to last until approximately 5am (for a rough estimate of 6 hours to deploy).

In our previous newsletter, we briefly described the coming changes, but here, now, is the complete detailed list of all the changes that will be getting deployed in less than 24 hours.

* Advanced Layout Options (Full HTML customization) for all three main views of the forum (Thread View, Thread List, and Classic Mode Index). This ultimately means that you can completely rewrite the look and feel of your forum, adding graphics however you wish. Users are able to select which view they prefer, allowing multiple different layouts.

* To go with the new Advanced Layout Options for the forum, we're deploying a number of pre-made templates, complete with source code, for the forum views. This includes 4 Thread Views, and 3 Thread List Views. We're only providing a single Classic mode view, but we plan on adding more as time goes on.

* Hover-over summary of threads. Hovering your mouse over a thread will give you a brief summary about the thread (number of posts since your last view).

* Inline editing of posts. Rather than having to load the separate popup window to Edit, you can now perform inline editing. Choosing “Quick Edit” will simply load the post itself into a text box where the post text itself would be. This allows for very quick editing.

* Quick Reply, and Quick Quote: Similar to the inline editing, this will display a quick popup window for making rapid replies.

* Post rating. This option is configurable to allow rating based on rank, as well as disabling down-votes, or disabling rating altogether (since it's possible you may not wish to use rating on your site).

* Among other options, there is Multi-quoting, Thread merging and splitting, Mass Sticky, Mass Lock, Mass Delete, Mass Thread Destroy, Mass Thread Tag changing. You can also mark a thread as Unread by you.

* Two New BBCode Tags: [collapse] and [hover]. Collapse will allow you to specify a header text, and then enclose a section of text, which defaults to hidden, but can be expanded out, or collapsed back in. This [collapse] tag will be useful for things like Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs), since you can quickly list the questions, but contain the answers in the collapsed section. The [hover] tag will present a custom hover-over message.

* BBCode Menus: The [title] and [subtitle] tags have had a serious boost. Entering either of those tags will contribute to a new menu that will display at the top (like the Table of Contents on longer Wikipedia pages). Clicking the menu item at the top will immediately scroll you to the relevant section in the post.

* Custom BBCode: Admins now have the ability to create their own custom BBCode using perl regular expressions.

* The News page has gotten some Advanced Layout Options, too. You can completely customize your news page, allowing you to not only change how the News itself is displayed, but also integrate various widgets into the news page: Upcoming Events, Last Items Received, Raid Progressing, Gallery Preview, Latest Forum Posts/Blog Post/Guide Updates, an “About” blurb, and even a quick view of the top DKP standings. Users also have the options to customize around which sections display which data, only for them, making the News page a massively dynamic display of the relevant data.

* The gallery has been heavily modified to allow commenting and show multiple sizes for images (150, 450, 800, and full size pictures). Additional security has been applied to the Gallery as well, allowing for customized levels of security for each sub gallery (which users can post, which users can moderate, etc).

* To go with the gallery update, we've also added a Gallery preview menu, which will display a random image from the gallery, and which changes automatically every 5 seconds.

* The Advanced Layout Options admin page itself has been significantly updated. You will be able to Test your layout without disabling your popup blocker. Instead, Clicking “Test It” will now allow you to go from page to page previewing how your layout will look, verifying that it displays properly on each page. This makes testing and deployment of your Advanced Layout much more streamlined and friendly.

* To go along with all this, we've added a preposterous number of CSS classes you can work with to customize your site further.


Naturally, there are other smaller, subtler changes to go along with all these changes (as well as bug-fixes). We look forward to your feedback and suggestions to further improve the new (and old) features.


Just because we're done with this particular upgrade, don't go thinking we're taking any kind of breaks. On the contrary, we're jumping right ahead into the next major section, one for which the changes will be rapid and incremental, rather than the past two monolithic changes (The forum system, and the multi-game patch in June). We're giving the DKP entry process more flexibility, including better on-site support for EPGP data entry and a revamp of our in-game DKP mod, the GuildRaidSnapShot.

We're also going to be adding an embedded music player (a very commonly requested item), and an embedded video section.

Historically, we've requested users who wish to upload large data such as videos to free file hosting sites like Filefront.com. We'll be changing that policy by adding an embedded video section, allowing you to upload your videos to the site, and they'll be converted and playable on an in-site embedded flash player (like YouTube). The benefit to using our system, however, is that the videos will be processed in high quality. Rather than converting the videos to 320x200 like Youtube does, your videos will be processed in a much higher quality, such that enabling full-screen mode will be almost as good as if you were watching the source video. Due to the heavy bandwidth of such a service, the pricing is yet undetermined, but we're making an effort to allow sites the ability to upload at least a couple videos without having to pay an extra fee. This functionality is expected within the next few weeks.


We appreciate all your patience. The forum rewrite ended up taking significantly longer than originally expected, but we feel it's very worth the wait, and we think you'll agree.

So get ready. At 11pm CDT tonight, September 9th, we'll be taking the DKPSystem.com site down for approximately 6 hours to deploy these latest changes.

Thank you for being a part of the DKPSystem.com network,

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It's all in the reflexes.

Upgrade Completed! And before scheduled time.

Let the bug reports roll on in!

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It's all in the reflexes.

Is there a way to disable the Table of contents menu?

I like the other changes ))

There is, but it requires you to not use [title] and [subtitle]. Instead, use [size] to change the font size.

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It's all in the reflexes.

Got it Thanks Chops

Thanks for the table of contents removal tip.
Is there a way to get rid of the Rating column on the index? Just isn't relevant to us and takes up space. Thanks.

Yup.

Admin > Forum > Misc Forum Settings.

I'm actually going to disable the ratings by default, since they don't seem terribly popular.

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It's all in the reflexes.

I like the changes Chops...

The forum preview thing is the only thing that I'm not 100% sure about... seems to not work that well in IE6

Otherwise, great job - so many new toys to play with

Dont know if this is a major thing but will ask.

When doing the News menu with simple message
(I defaulted the message to Last forum posts)

The present format is two lines such as:

Post: PostTitle
1 hour ago by User


Is there anyway it can be

Post: PostTitle(aligned left) USER 1 hour ago(aligned right)

In other words we can put more last posts in that menu without it taking up more space.

Another thing I just discovered.. the news settings cannot be set as a default for all users. Each person has to customize there news menu. Is that working as intended?


You can see what Im talking about here www.myth-guild.us

Alrighty, more changes to the beta version.

The fundamentals have been completely redone again, without sacrificing any features. In particular, the Ajax has been toned down. This will make the site seem more responsive, but certain features that were previously cached by the Ajax (such as the "Back to Index" link).

* The tabs are gone, reverted to the original bar with the links contaiing "Simple Filter", "Advanced Filter", "Classic Mode", and "My Private Tags". Additionally, the tabs for the Thread Tag Categories has been restored as well, but with a slight aesthetic upgrade.

* The "Quick Filter" (as we're calling it now) has been returned. This is the box containing "Show Unread", "Show Private Only", etc. You might be wondering what happened to the "Mark All Threads Unread" option in that box. That option has been moved to the "Multi-Thread Actions" option (it makes more sense to group that function with other "Actions" and not with "Filters" as it previously was).

* The option has been added to the Account profile allowing users to disable the "Quick Edit/Reply/Quote" popup, as some had expressed their dissatisfaction with having to click twice to reply (understandably so). Disabling this option will stop that from happening, and will always do the "Full" option without the extra click.

* The option has been added to the Account profile to disable the hover-over summaries, as it was a impediment for those with slower or higher-latency connections.

* Clicking a Thread link will now take you immediately to the first unread post in the thread.

* The search option has been reworked as well, giving a quick-search in the upper left corner of the "Thread List" and "Classic Mode" views. If a more in-depth search is necessary, a new "Advanced Search" link is available underneath.

* Checkboxes have been removed from the "Classic Mode" altogether

* Checkboxes have been removed from the "Thread View" fior non-admins. The checkboxes remain for administrative functions like splitting, merging, deleting, etc.

* A new view for "Classic Mode" has been enabled, moving things around a bit.

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It's all in the reflexes.